Student Background, Second Placement

Joseph McNure

Student A is a junior trumpet player that suffers from severe, random anxiety. Student A
does have some regular anxiety with specific things, including travel and isolation in the
classroom, but can also experience some random occurrences. Student A works hard enough
to play her parts and is in the auditioned jazz band, but doesn’t participate in extracurricular
music settings aside from marching band. Most of the lessons and exercises in jazz band relate
to improvising and require that we hear most students play individually. This is usually not an
issue as the students that audition into that group enjoy playing music and it has no effect on
their confidence. Student A, however, will not improvise on her own or play parts from the music
on her own. This makes it difficult to assess where she is, but as a solution I have the whole
band improvise over the exercise at the same time. This way she is at least involved (she thinks
none of the other students are paying attention to her if they are also improvising). Assessment
can only happen in context of the whole trumpet section, but I can usually pick her sound out of
it. I have not been on any band trips, but Student A also experiences some travel anxiety. This
requires careful supervision on behalf of the teachers and chaperones.

Student B is a sophomore saxophone player with vision impairment. This disability

becomes most tricky during marching band season, where part of the rehearsals take place
outside daylight hours. Music and drill need to be printed at larger fonts to create less struggle
for Student B. It is possible for him to read music at normal font, however that will cause him to
fall behind in the music learning process. Student B encounters some struggle with making
friends, however my cooperating teacher has created such an environment that all students act
respectfully towards one another. Overall, Student B likes to work hard and takes auditions so
that he can play with the advanced groups. Student B also has a private music teacher on
saxophone which helps him stay with the rest of the players in his section.